Fantasy's "Unreality" Makes It Safer for Exploring Cultural Issues

Fantasy is a useful sub-set through which to explore popular culture not only because of its prominent position at the present historical moment,but because its inherently non-mimetic nature creates a space which is at least nominally not “the real world” and is therefore safer for cultural work around fraught issues such as – although by no means limited to – race. This is not to suggest that the imagined worlds of Fantasy are separate from reality, but rather that the inclusion of an impossible element – magic, dragons, and the like – constructs rhetorical distance between one and the other. That rhetorical distance can be merely escapist and allow a work to not overtly engage with difficult questions, but, like other speculative genres – Science Fiction and Horror – Fantasy has the potential to make us look at our world in new ways, to reconsider attitudes and assumptions. This volume explores Fantasy which both does and does not overtly engage with discourses around race and difference, taking an approach inspired by critical race theory by considering Whiteness as race and racial habit.